Take me home: Parkinson's, my Father, myself

Description:

Take Me Home is a book-length memoir about Taylor’s father and his disease. It draws on general research into Parkinson’s disease, dementia and theories of consciousness, as well as personal and biographical research. Whilst recognisably part of an established genre, this book also reshapes and re-imagines the memoir form: it is geographically, rather than chronologically, structured, and it includes discussion of literary and musical texts, as well as direct memories of people, events and places. It also explicitly engages with other past memoirs. In that sense, it involves elements of textual criticism.
Take Me Home represents a rare literary examination of dementia and long-term care, and their effects on families. It also looks back to Taylor’s father’s mysterious earlier life, before he contracted Parkinson’s disease, and hence embodies a form of personal and, at times, social history. It constructs a narrative from fragmentary memories, documents, anecdotes and other texts. This narrative investigates the nature of memory, consciousness, father-son-relationships, and the metaphorical, as well as literal, meanings of mental disease.